The Ghetto and Other Poems eBook

Bring fuel—­drive the fires high...
Throw all this artist-lumber in
And foolish dreams of making things...
(Ten million men are called to die.)

As for the common men apart,
Who sweat to keep their common breath,
And have no hour for books or art—­
What dreams have these to hide from death!

A TOAST

Not your martyrs anointed of heaven—­
The ages are red where
they trod—­
But the Hunted—­the world’s bitter
leaven—­
Who smote at your imbecile
God—­

A being to pander and fawn to,
To propitiate, flatter
and dread
As a thing that your souls are in pawn to,
A Dealer who traffics
the dead;

A Trader with greed never sated,
Who barters the souls
in his snares,
That were trapped in the lusts he created,
For incense and masses
and prayers—­

They are crushed in the coils of your halters;
’Twere well—­by
the creeds ye have nursed—­
That ye send up a cry from your altars,
A mass for the Martyrs
Accursed;

A passionate prayer from reprieval
For the Brotherhood
not understood—­
For the Heroes who died for the evil,
Believing the evil was
good.

To the Breakers, the Bold, the Despoilers,
Who dreamed of a world
over-thrown...
They who died for the millions of toilers—­
Few—­fronting
the nations alone!

—­To the Outlawed of men and the Branded,
Whether hated or hating
they fell—­
I pledge the devoted, red-handed,
Unfaltering Heroes of
Hell!

ACCIDENTALS

“THE EVERLASTING RETURN”

It is dark... so dark, I remember the sun on Chios...
It is still... so still, I hear the beat of our paddles
on the Aegean...

Ten times we had watched the moon
Rise like a thin white virgin out of the waters
And round into a full maternity...
For thrice ten moons we had touched no flesh
Save the man flesh on either hand
That was black and bitter and salt and scaled by the
sea.

The Athenian boy sat on my left...
His hair was yellow as corn steeped in wine...
And on my right was Phildar the Carthaginian,
Grinning Phildar
With his mouth pulled taut as by reins from his black
gapped teeth.
Many a whip had coiled about him
And his shoulders were rutted deep as wet ground under
chariot wheels,
And his skin was red and tough as a bull’s hide
cured in the sun.
He did not sing like the other slaves,
But when a big wind came up he screamed with it.
And always he looked out to sea,
Save when he tore at his fish ends
Or spat across me at the Greek boy, whose mouth was
red and apart
like an opened fruit.